A team of neuroscientists at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, in Lisbon, has been able to map single neural connections over long distances in the brain. “These are the first measurements of neural inputs between local circuits and faraway sites”, says Leopoldo Petreanu, who led the research.

For the first time we had the great opportunity of hosting a group of 10 high school students for Ocupação Científica dos Jovens nas Férias, a very successful program of “science in the summer” from Ciência Viva – National Agency for Scientific and Technological Culture.

The sheer size of the network of nervous cells that reside in the vertebrate gut has earned it that nickname in recent years. Now, judging by the research led by Henrique Veiga-Fernandes, at Instituto de Medicina Molecular, who is currently moving his lab to the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon, it appears that it is actually a well-deserved one. The results were published on July 13th in Nature magazine.

People who suffer from OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) are unable to stop performing certain motor tasks, such as washing their hands. They can literally spend hours stuck to the sink.

At the other end of the spectrum, people with ADHD (attention deficit-hyperactive disorder), are unable to pursue the same motor action for long: they sit, they get up, they walk around, always restless, constantly doing this or that for no apparent reason.

The Cajal Course in Computational Neuroscience (CCCN) is a three-weeks school that teaches the central ideas, methods, and practice of modern computational neuroscience through a combination of lectures and hands-on project work. Each morning is devoted to lectures given by distinguished international faculty on topics across the breadth of experimental and computational neuroscience.

To find out more about this course, read the feedback from two Teaching Assistants (TA) and one student.

From September 21 to 24, the fifth edition of the Neuroscience Symposium of the Champalimaud Foundation (CF) took place in Lisbon.

I was always driven by questions that spark my curiosity, but my research path has always been a bit serendipitous and influenced by my social environment, the people around me.

Even though they have a tiny brain, honeybees are amazingly good at finding their way in a complex environment. What do we know about it and why should we care (even if we don’t like honey)?

When I started working in this field I thought: why would a tissue as indispensable as the brain – we will never be able to replace the brain – have given up the opportunity to be assisted by the immune system? It doesn’t make sense.

Using a computerised visualisation technique newly developed at their lab by Verónica Corrales-Carvajal, the team led by Carlos Ribeiro “dissected” the impact of diet on the feeding choices and food-seeking strategies of fruit flies.

“The alteration of risk-taking behaviors under the influence of diet can have profound implications, affecting exploration behaviors not related to food seeking. It is likely a more general phenomenon, also taking place in other contexts.” – Carlos Ribeiro